


hard reset: symphonic poem

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Classical Music, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Punk, Drug Abuse, Grunge AU, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Shows Up Six Years Late With Whatever This Is, Spokane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:21:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21552172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: "Are you an expert on shit death disease?"
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Comments: 41
Kudos: 104





	1. Chapter 1

Grantaire figured everybody knew he was sick because of bad drugs, so he didn’t bother telling anyone. Eventually Eponine came over and chewed him out. She rustled him out of bed and they went to the diner on the corner, where he buried his face in the nest of his arms on the formica table whilst the smell of biscuits and gravy wafting from the back room turned his stomach, whilst Eponine monologued her customary lovelorn monologue. “You’ll feel better when you eat,” she told him finally, noticing that his entire body was fragmenting. With the index fingernail she’d chipped all her black nail polish from she pushed her mug of steaming ginger tea his way. 

“Are you an expert on shit death disease?” 

“Is that what you’re calling it?” 

The waitress brought the catastrophic amount of food Eponine had ordered, which included a plate of burnt unbuttered toast, placed ceremoniously before Grantaire. He groaned. 

“Why’d you even do this,” Eponine asked him, mouth full of eggs benedict. “Every single time you’re like, ooh, I’ll never buy anything from Montparnasse again, it feels like he cooks it in the basement with pesticide and turpentine.” 

“He does,” Grantaire moaned into the table. “I’ve seen it.” 

“Then why the fuck do you do it!” 

He managed to prop his head up in his hand. The sight of the food crashed like a great wave of burning tar through the meticulously erected siege hardware in his gut; he felt like he might imminently vomit, but also like he could keel over and die from hunger. “I don’t know,” he told Eponine, reaching gingerly for a piece of toast. “You ever need a hard reset?” 

“You could just smoke pot and jerk off in a hot bath.” 

“I wish it was that easy.” 

\--

The violinist was at the practice space. Grantaire nearly turned around and walked out, and would have, except Eponine was behind him, with her palms against his shoulderblades. “To what do we owe the pleasure,” Grantaire said, kind of acidly, not really meaning it; couldn’t help it, because he was being washed out with acid inside. Unfreezing himself from the doorway with the help of Eponine’s little shove. His guitar was in the corner resting on his amp, which the violinist was sitting on, so he went and got Marius’s guitar instead. 

“You’re still alive,” said the violinist with no delight. “Nobody’s seen you for days.” 

“I had the flu.” 

“Self-imposed flu,” Eponine said, sitting behind her drums, unearthing the key from her purse and tightening the heads. 

“How do you self-impose — ” 

“What’s your poison these days, R, meth?” 

“Go ask Montparnasse. I don’t care what it is. It works.” 

The violinist set his instrument gently on his lap. It was about as perfectly and hatably sculpted as he was. “Who the fuck is Montparnasse,” he said. 

“Chemist,” Eponine explained. “Dropped out of WSU. He experiments with assorted narcotic compounds, but none of us are crazy enough to take them except — ”

“Ep, come on — ”

“ — except Grantaire, when he wants a _hard reset_.” 

She and the violinist shared a kind of disbelieving and piteous laugh. Grantaire turned Marius’s amp up as loud as it would go and turned the volume on the guitar up as loud as it would go and struck the most eviscerating D minor possible. 

\--

“Are you really alright,” said the violinist, later, at the pub. They knew the bartender and all the kitchen staff, because everybody cool in Spokane under the age of twenty-five knew each other, and as such they had been drinking steadily for many hours. The charcoal toast and a sizable joint at the practice space had muted the insufferable nausea such that Grantaire had sought to mute every other bad feeling with judicious application of gin. 

“I’m always fine,” he told the violinist, draining the fifth G&T. He had no sooner put the empty glass down than the bartender brought another, and a basket of limp fries. 

“It sounds like you spent the last week poisoning yourself.” 

“We’re poisoning ourselves right now,” said Grantaire, indicating the violinist’s beer with the sixth G&T. 

“You quicker than me.” 

“Well, I have a higher tolerance than you.” 

“I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of,” said the violinist, looking away across the dark bar toward the jukebox, where somebody had put on the Psychedelic Furs. A line from Wilfred Owen seeped into Grantaire’s mind through the hastily-erected, barbed wire-lined iron grille propped over any and all memories stemming from his ill-fated attempt to pursue a degree in music theory at Whitman College: _I saw his round mouth’s crimson deepen as it fell…_

“Listen,” Grantaire said, feeling vengeful, “let me have this one fucking thing please. It’s not like I have anything else to be proud of.” 

\--

Eponine was outside the bar through the ice-frosted windows, gesturing with a cigarette. When Grantaire went outside to bum one, drunkenly struggling into his coat, he heard her telltale storytelling cadence then “ — and he’s never really been the same since then.” 

He coughed like a dying person. The violinist turned toward him in the vestibule, looking surprised and guilty like a cornered raccoon except beautiful, as Eponine peered regretfully around his contrapposto shoulder. 

\--

“I don’t understand why we have to play with the violinist,” Grantaire said as Eponine dragged him out of the car by his wrists and set about shoving him up the icy back stairs to his garret apartment. 

“R, you fucking suggested — I thought you liked the violinist.” 

“Yeah, I mean, in a carnal way, and in the symphony…” 

Sometimes he remembered he had started this whole thing. He had, hadn’t he? His mom, who had moved in with her boyfriend in Coeur d’Alene and never called anymore, had gotten him for Christmas tickets to see the local symphony orchestra, and he couldn’t bring himself to invite anyone else to go with him, because he was too embarrassed, and because he knew he was going to cry. They did Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night.” He went out afterward into the transfigured night. The violinist was in the stage door, smoking a fucking clove cigarette. Thus spake the thunder. Thus spake Grantaire: “I play in this band, um, like a grunge band…?” 

\--

He woke up in the morning tossed in the cold light of day. Literally cold, because the heat hadn’t come on for some reason, though there was frost on the window and a pale dusting of snow on the ground, and when he finally managed to get to his feet, stop throwing up, and clean the puke out of the sink, he found the bright red letter from the gas company on the kitchen counter, where he must have put it upon his return from Montparnasse’s, or where Eponine must have put it one of these times she’d dragged him home. His bare feet were bright white against the dark wood. He remembered suddenly the last lines from that Wilfred Owen poem: _and in his eyes / the cold stars lighting, very old and bleak / in different skies._

\--

“Fucking the violinist isn’t going to cure your crushing loneliness,” said Eponine. They were at the practice space, they were holding their instruments, even, but they were just smoking a joint. 

“Ugh. How do you know?” 

“I just know.” 

She was right, so he pivoted. “Well, I know too. I just need a win.” 

\--

The violinist was classically trained. According to the biography in the pamphlet from the "Transfigured Night” performance, he was French Canadian, from rural Quebec. His accent was most audible on particularly hideous English words. He had gone to Julliard. Grantaire wondered if playing for the symphony of a city like Spokane was hard on his ego. 

This wasn’t even a third-rate city, he thought sometimes, walking around. It was probably rated around fifth. It might have even been sixth or seventh among cities in Washington, given that Ellensburg at least had the Screaming Trees to its name. Then again, he understood that he felt for the city a particular loathing that could only be reserved for one’s hometown when one had once had loftier dreams. Deep in the Spokane-loathing was, as always, the omnipresent self-loathing. The same was at the heart of his loathing of the violinist, which wasn’t really loathing. Which was easier to think of as loathing. Easier than admitting that after the performance he had written off to a few classical music subscription services, and had ordered out of the classified ads a cassette tape that was alleged to be a bootleg recording of the previous orchestra the violinist had played with, a small Edmonton company, doing Rachmaninov’s “Isle of the Dead.” And that when the cassette turned out to be blank, he had ripped all the tape out of the spool and tried to burn it, mostly just succeeding in smoking himself out of his apartment and destroying one of the burners on his stove. 

\--

Grantaire arrived at the pub fresh from his shift at the college print shop to find the violinist in the customary back corner, declaiming on something or other to anybody who would listen, which, as usual, turned out to be everybody cool in Spokane under twenty-five who wasn't in the pub kitchen or behind the bar. This had become a semi-regular occurrence since he had joined their circle, on Grantaire’s invitation, as the others never hesitated to remind him. He went to the bar and ordered a whiskey, neat. Then he went over to Marius. “What’s happening?” 

“He said the conductor says they’re doing John Cage.” 

“John Cage is good,” said Grantaire. Years ago at Whitman he’d done a paper on “Music of Changes.” 

“Tell that to the violinist.” 

Grantaire steeled himself, shot back the whiskey, and tuned into the diatribe. 

“ — if you want to profile a contemporary American composer, what about somebody who has respect for the form, like Aaron Copland? I mean, maybe it's a little amateur, but — ” 

“You would call Copland contemporary?” 

Grantaire kicked himself for asking, and Marius elbowed him, evidently feeling similarly. But an argument this ridiculous begged a rebuttal. 

The violinist looked up. His eyes seemed to focus like a camera lens, and what they found was wanting. In the foreground Eponine turned to Cosette behind her and began whispering furiously. “He was working at the same time as Cage,” the violinist said with extreme calm. 

“You know what I mean,” said Grantaire. “He’s basically the composer equivalent of, like, Albert Bierstadt. His work is functionally orientalist in its mythological and colonialist imaging of the meaning of America.” 

He wouldn’t deny he got off on this. 

“You don’t find the music beautiful?” the violinist dared. 

“Of course it’s beautiful. That it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it’s important! When the Impressionists were literally changing the course of Western painting for good, the most famous working painter was — ”

“Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, I know, and his work _is_ important, to the Symbolist movement…” 

“Listen, Symbolist paintings are cool and all but you know as well as I they were very academic, really, basically just a step across from Bouguereau, they didn't shake the fucking foundation of modernity!” 

Acid seeped, delightfully, into the violinist’s tone. “You think Cage — ” aggressive air quotes— “shakes the foundation of modernity?” 

“Certainly more than fucking Aaron Copland!” 

They were yelling now, drowning out Eno on the jukebox. 

“Grantaire, your entire output as a musician consists of four fucking drone chords on guitar and overuse of tritones and augmented fifths, and _you’re_ lecturing _me_ on the historical importance of an iconic composer?” 

“I have half a degree,” Grantaire said. “Please. The Seattle scene is going to change the world.” 

The violinist scoffed. Before Grantaire had met the violinist, he hadn’t known anybody who actually scoffed, let alone whose scoff was such a textbook fucking scoff. 

“I might be an undereducated plebe, but don’t think someone of your great and terrible consequence would deign to come and play in my band every once in a while if you didn’t think there was something exciting about the music,” Grantaire continued, this of course being true. “Unless you just want to rail Eponine. Or me.” 

“Hey,” said Marius, offended about something or other, probably about having been left out. 

The subsequent laughter kind of broke the spell, but Grantaire would be lying if he said he didn’t appreciate the burning gaze he could feel following him as he went back to the bar for another whiskey. 

\--

Later, somebody put Stephen Stills on the jukebox: _I’m gonna try again, don’t matter if I win or lose, gonna try again anyway…_

Grantaire did want to smoke the joint he’d been carrying around in his pocket all day, and the violinist was out in the alleyway behind the bar just stewing. He watched intently as Grantaire put the joint in his mouth and sparked it, and then they watched each other for a while, trying to figure out who was going to say it first, and what “it” was to begin with. The smoke moved like a ghost up toward the light. 

Grantaire was just about fucked enough to let what he was thinking come out of his mouth. “Why don’t you come over to my place and take it out on me?” 

“You want to have a fistfight?” 

“Yeah.” Deep inhale. Inside the jukebox changed over; the only sound was the paper combusting, a dog barking down the street. Then the Stones: _I saw her today at the reception…_ “I want whatever you want.” 

The violinist swallowed. “Okay,” he said. 

\--

Logically, it was frigid cold in Grantaire’s apartment, except his heart was beating a thousand miles an hour, and he felt like he had been transported to the earth’s molten core. It got worse when it was revealed that whatever the violinist wanted started with: “Take your clothes off and get on the bed.” 

“I thought you wanted to fight,” Grantaire said, but he was already pulling his sweater over his head. “I haven’t punched anybody since my Tonalities professor.” 

If he’d known someone was coming over, let alone the fucking violinist, he would have hidden all the past due notices, and done a better job cleaning the puke out of the sink. Anyway, it was too late, and besides the violinist seemed fixated on his body for some reason. Grantaire sat on the edge of his bed. He was very aware of his own nipples, which hurt because it was so cold. 

The violinist got one of the rickety chairs from the kitchen table and brought it over. He was obliged to go back and get the other one when he sat in the first chair and almost fell through it. “Sorry,” said Grantaire. 

“You live like this?” The violinist was not quite joking. 

“I spend all my money on pedals.” 

“And drugs.” 

“Yeah. And drugs, of course.” 

They were nose to nose like this. It probably would not be taken very well to ask for a kiss after what he had said but he thought he had never wanted anything so badly as a kiss. He approximated: “Want me to suck — ”

“Lie down,” said the violinist. “On your belly,” he clarified when Grantaire did it wrong, as he did most things wrong. 

He could taste his heart like this. It was probably shaking the whole bed. “There’s lube somewhere,” he said; this was maybe a little presumptuous, but, in that, served, he hoped, to drive present events toward their desired ends. His voice was violently trembling. “It’s probably expired, though.” 

A note of concern entered the violinist’s voice. “Can we still use it?” 

“I don’t care. You’d better fucking use it!” 

“I know,” said the violinist. “I know.” 

He was rattling around in the bedside table drawers, which — Grantaire did not even want to think about what he was no doubt finding in there. He turned his head to watch. The intent expression on the violinist’s face looked much as it had when he’d played a pivotal solo in “Transfigured Night.” 

He had wanted even then — immediately, basically — to be an instrument tuned, held, tweaked, plucked, bowed by the violinist. He thought of the way a broken string snapped and coiled up tightly. Horsehair shredding elegant white loops against the floor. 

After approximately an age of the earth the violinist unearthed the bottle from the drawer. He met Grantaire’s eye, and spit into his elegant hand. 

“Oh, fuck,” said Grantaire. 

\--

“I never thought of myself as a very sexual person,” said the violinist. 

There was nothing particularly objectionable about the statement generally, but it was a mildly ridiculous thing to say with two of one’s fingers inside someone else. “How do you feel now?” Grantaire said. 

“I’m really not sure.” 

“Oh,” said Grantaire. He turned his face away from the violinist and the window. “Okay.” 

“How do _you_ feel?” 

“What?” 

“I said how do you — ”

“I heard you. But why — ” 

“I want you to feel something,” said the violinist. “I think that’s most of what I feel.” 

“Right.” 

In the silence, Grantaire heard a siren several streets over, and the wind. His own heartbeat in his ear. 

“So…” 

“I — oh. You can, I won’t break.” 

“Really?” 

“I don’t know, not like this.” He tucked his hand under his knee and brought it up to his chest, closing his eyes. “You don’t even have to touch me,” he said, not meaning it. “I could do it.” 

“I want to.” 

“Okay.” 

Like this the violinist’s touch felt very deep inside, reaching with a key inside to shift the levers and unlock something very secret, maybe too secret… Grantaire’s mouth was open against the itchy bedspread and there was another hand on his face suddenly moving his hair away from his eyes. 

“It doesn’t — you don’t need to comfort me.” 

“I’m trying to look at your face.” 

He laughed but the laughing — it struck something and it wasn’t funny anymore. “For god’s sake, why?” 

The violinist ignored him. “Tell me if it’s too much,” he said. 

Of course it was too much but not in the way he was asking. “You could put your entire hand inside me,” Grantaire told him, which was emotionally true, if not physically proven. “You tell me if it’s too much.” 

“Hmm,” said the violinist, and did. Slow, but he did. 

His hand was light. 

It was the best drug ever. 

It was like being picked apart like a knot in a very old piece of jewelry from a really good estate sale on the north side of town where some old lady had lived alone for years slowly mouldering like in a Faulkner novel. It was like being a knot in a really old piece of jewelry that could not be untied by human hands, being separated maximally delicately with sledgehammers. When the knot was undone it revealed another tighter older knot which was henceforth undone, and on and on and on until — well. 

Hard reset. 

\--

Morning was a crushing D minor chord. Grantaire felt like a newborn colt. Like emerging from the depths that one time he had comorbidly attempted acid and MDMA. It took him about an hour to get up, and he was starving, but there was no food in the house, and no money in his wallet, because he had managed to get a check for the gas bill together, except there was also no money to mail it. Worst of all, there was no money to go to even the sketchiest laundromat to clean his bedspread, which was already in bad shape and perhaps now completely irredeemable. He took a cold shower and felt marginally more clear-headed, and then he went down the block to the payphone and called Eponine collect. 

She met him at the diner. Walking over there it had hit him exactly what he had done, and he felt so sick it made him feel frail, like having pneumonia or tuberculosis or the plague or something, so that when Eponine saw him she said, “What happened to you? What did you take?” 

It’s this great new drug called being fisted by the most beautiful person in the world, Grantaire didn’t say. The high is really fucking high, but the low is really fucking low. 

\--

He went out into the alley behind the pub, already digging the tinfoil fold out of his pocket, except when he got out there the cold air struck him hard in the face and so did the sight of the shadow of the other person in the alley. “Hey,” said the violinist, just as Grantaire turned heel. Then a somewhat differently calibrated “Hey!” 

He was caught by the shoulder which was put against the brick wall. A third, uniquely charged “Hey.” 

“Hey,” said Grantaire, defeated. 

“What are you doing out here?” 

He showed the violinist the tinfoil fold between his first two fingers. “I actually don’t know what it is. I think you snort it.” 

“Okay well, don’t let me stop you.” 

The violinist let go Grantaire’s shoulder and crossed his arms over his chest tightly as though to keep himself from doing something. Grantaire unfolded the tinfoil. The stuff inside was kind of chunky and sugary. “Want some?” 

“No.” 

“Suit yourself.” 

He got some under his fingernail and put it to his nose and inhaled sharply. Suddenly he was aware that the entire universe as known was but an electron rocketing about inside an atom rocketing about inside a cell rocketing about inside the body of some other being and that inside himself were an infinitude of similar universes and inside the violinist were an infinitude of other similar universes. His knees buckled. The violinist grabbed him under the arm, as though he were a swooning Victorian lady. 

“Listen,” said the violinist, “um, the other night — ” 

The memory of the other night dawned upon him as all of time and space exploding out of a hyper-pressurized silver ball in the white space before everything. The memory of the physical sensation was more like the taste of rain. Closer was the recollection of the pitch, the exact ringing tone of that other thing, which felt like a heaving, shattering grief, unmuted inside him, washing out of him, like a death-knell or an air raid siren going in the night. 

Now he thought he really needed the violinist’s hand under his arm. “Yeah,” he managed. Speaking was like… maybe churning butter — some extremely trying physical effort of production that he thought he only remembered from a past life. “You left.”

“You asked me to!” 

Grantaire laughed. “No fucking way.” 

“You did! I didn’t want to!” 

“Nobody ever kicked you out before?” 

“No,” said the violinist embarrassedly. “Why?” 

“Why what?” 

“Why did you tell me to leave!” 

He didn’t quite remember doing it, especially not like this, but he knew himself, or at least he knew this. “What were you going to do,” he said, “hold me? Besides, they turned off the gas at my place.” 

The violinist seemed to be evaluating which clause of this statement should be most urgently addressed. 

“Come on,” said Grantaire. “I want to look at the river.” 

In the park it was frigid cold and pitch dark. There was no moon but the stars had emerged from the quickly moving clouds and were throwing sparks off into the trees and the dark buildings. 

“Aren’t you cold?” said the violinist. 

“No.” 

“I went to the library and looked at the microfiche from Whitman,” the violinist went on, for some reason. “It was wrong of them not to let you back in after… everything else that happened.” 

“They invited me back,” Grantaire said. “I said they could go fuck themselves.” 

“Why?” 

He was forced to eventually admit that he didn’t fucking know. 

\--

In the morning he woke up under about ninety blankets piled up on the bed, most of which were not his. There was frost on the window again, and there was a note on the kitchen table on top of the last notice from the gas company, pinned down against the draft under the door with two neatly stacked quarters. 

_Left you change for the bus and coffee._

_Come to rehearsal at the Fox at 11._

_You can call the gas company from the telephone in the green room._

_— E._


	2. Chapter 2

“You have a really brilliant mind for theory,” said the violinist. 

“Ha.” 

“I’m serious. It’s kind of a shame you use it on… this.” 

They were listening to a tape they’d made of the band’s practice the day previous. The violinist had invited himself over to listen to it, though he had only stuck around for one song’s worth of the actual practice before storming out in a huff. Grantaire didn’t think his guitar sounded scrapy enough, but he wasn’t sure what to do in order to achieve the tone he was looking for, which could not even really be described and as such could not very well be identified in the classified ads in the gear magazines he subscribed to. 

Admittedly they were a pretty nontraditional beat combo, things considered. Eponine played drums and sang. Marius had refused to play bass but had settled for downtuning his guitar a step and a half. Around the time he had been kicked out of Whitman Grantaire had been listening to a lot of medieval dirges and a Terry Riley cassette he’d found at a secondhand store in Pullman. The violinist, when he deigned to jam with them, lent a particularly funereal edge to the sustained drones and crashes. 

“I mean it,” the violinist went on. Grantaire turned the volume up a few notches on the tape player and the violinist turned it down again. “That's a really wild chord progression.” 

“For the love of god,” said Grantaire, “stop complimenting me.” 

\--

He wanted the guitar to sound, he thought, kicking a stone, like what you’d think lightning hitting metal sounded like if you didn’t know it didn’t make a sound. Possibly like the sound that lightning hitting metal probably made on some other vibrational frequency audible only by mice and cockroaches, translated into a pitch that could be parsed by the human ear. Like bright blue light. Otherwise like Steve Albini’s guitar tone on _Atomizer_ but like the train screaming around the bend throwing sparks in the night was thirty miles away across apocalyptic fields of burning sludge. Otherwise like the swallowing depth of the cello in Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night” coming out of the inside of Mount Saint Helens seconds before the 1980 eruption. Otherwise… 

“R, come over here,” Eponine called across the golden field.

The purpose of coming all the way out here had been to take photos, but Cosette was saying that the light was wrong. The golden nothingness went as far as the eye could see in every direction, until it turned into the Columbia valley and the mountains stretching up toward the Canadian border. Here and there scattered across the fields the catastrophic floods that had shaped this place had deposited massive black boulders of volcanic ore, like sacramental menhirs from pagan times. 

He went over to Eponine and Marius and Cosette who had clustered around one such rock. It was shedding pieces of itself off into a pile. “We can try against the black,” Cosette was explaining, changing lenses. “Better balance.” 

“Do I have to show my face,” Grantaire asked generally of all gathered. 

Eponine groaned. 

“I think it would be nice,” said Marius. 

\--

The violinist was in the stage door. “I’m starting to think maybe you hate me,” he said. 

“How’s John Cage?” 

“Insufferable. God. I hate it.” He looked Grantaire up and down. He hated how good that felt. “Do you have another cigarette?” 

Grantaire patted his pockets. “All out.” 

“Let’s go get a pack.” 

They walked down the street together toward the drugstore. “Everybody likes it, though,” the violinist said. “We’re sold out all week.” 

“Oh yeah?” 

“You want to come?” 

“No.” 

“I thought you loved the modern composers.” 

I’ll fucking explode if I hear you playing Nocturne for Violin and Piano, Grantaire didn’t say. He knew that was on the docket because he had gone to the theater at the beginning of the run to check the program and see if it might be possible to ask his mother for tickets for his birthday. Back at school there had been a brief period where he had thought that was maybe the most beautiful piece of music ever. But it would not do to tell the violinist about this. 

“The Melvins are playing in Moscow,” Grantaire said instead. “Want to come?” 

“Not particularly.” 

“Alright. We’re even.” 

They walked across the river and watched the falls in the moonlight, smoking the cloves the violinist had insisted on buying. Grantaire touched his tongue inside his lip to taste the vanilla left there by the rolling paper and saw in his periphery that the violinist watched him. For some reason this led the violinist to ask, “What instrument did you play at school?” 

“I’ve always played guitar.” 

“Always?” 

“Since I was five.” 

Grantaire had always loved the falls. They just roared. As he had grown up most of the things that had seemed particularly massive and loud to him as a child had gotten a great deal less impressive, but the falls still roared. Maybe, he thought, this was a better reference point for the desired guitar tone… 

“This is an opening for you to talk about yourself,” said the violinist. 

Dear god. “What do you want to know?” 

“Literally anything!” 

“You know everything about me.” 

“I know nothing about you.” 

Grantaire put his cigarette out against the metal bannister and put the extinguished butt in the pocket of his jacket. “You know everything important.” 

\--

Here was the truth: his dad had had a guitar. His dad was a long haul trucker who had fallen asleep at the wheel on Highway 80 and flipped his semi four times into the South Platte River near Sutherland, Nebraska, or at least this was the story his mother had told him. As a child he had rarely seen his father, except for when he would come home and sit in front of the fireplace, drinking black coffee with bourbon in it late into the night, playing songs by the Buffalo Springfield. 

\--

Marius, as was typical, had discovered a new and particularly hilarious way of scrounging up money: moonlighting as a nude model in figure drawing classes at the university. He couldn’t make the night classes because he also worked pick-up shifts dishwashing at a sports bar downtown, so he offered Grantaire an in. He thought about it, and went so far as to call the art professor and say that he could make it on Thursday for a trial run, but instead he went to Montparnasse’s basement. He surfaced on Monday and dragged himself to the pub, where Marius was disappointed but unsurprised, and not even mad, because they had been offered a show. 

“What!” 

“How do you always fail up, R,” said Eponine, with maximal irritation, except she was smiling. 

“When? Where?” 

“We thought you were going to miss it,” Marius said. “We were drawing straws over who would have to go and get you.” 

“The college kids put it together,” Eponine explained. “They’re going to be shocked to see him with clothes on.” 

The show was on Friday night in an abandoned warehouse near the colleges. On Wednesday, Grantaire went to the payphone down the block from the diner and called the green room at the Fox to leave a message for the violinist, except the person who answered said, “I’ll go and get him.” 

“You don’t have to do that — ”

“It’s alright, he’s right here. Hold on.” 

She put the phone down. Grantaire thought about hanging up. He was taking the phone away from his ear and moving it toward the receiver, slowly, kind of testing. Then the violinist said, “Hello?” 

Perhaps the violinist heard the phone thunk back against Grantaire’s skull. “Hi!”

“Grantaire?” 

“Yeah. Hi.” 

“Is everything okay?” 

“We’re playing a show,” Grantaire said “Friday night.” 

In the unsettled silence, he heard cello tuning sounds from the violinist’s end. 

“I figured — well, I don’t know if you want to play with us.” 

“I don’t. I can’t. We have a performance.” 

“I mean, it’ll probably be later than that. We’ll probably go on at like midnight.” 

The cellist in the background started playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude. Grantaire hated this person without knowing who they were. The only reason to ever warm up with a song like that was to try and show you were better than anybody else who was listening. 

“Okay,” said the violinist. “Thanks for telling me.” 

“You’ll come?” 

His voice, he figured later, sounded about as desperate as that cello asshole hitting the masturbatory orgasmic climax of the Prelude. 

The violinist sighed long-sufferingly, which meant yes. 

\--

The warehouse was freezing cold and had not been occupied for perhaps a decade. It had been a grain and feed packaging plant, according to the ratty canvas bags that littered the floor behind the makeshift stage, which was just a rough diamond delineated by lines of gaff tape and surrounded by shitty old amplifiers. When Grantaire arrived, struggling to carry his amps inside from Eponine’s trunk, the college kids were busy building a bonfire in an oil drum in the middle of the floor. 

“Are we all going to get carbon monoxide poisoning,” Grantaire asked the girl who’d booked the gig. She had introduced herself as the general manager at the college radio station. 

Smiling, she pointed up toward a hole in the roof. “A tree or something fell through a couple years ago. Nobody’s died yet.” 

There was a great big icicle dripping through the tear. “Great,” Grantaire said. He set his amps up and unearthed his flask from the pocket of his guitar case and bellied up to the bonfire in attempt to discern which of the college kids might have the best drugs. 

By the time they went on he was higher than the Byrds song. He was high enough to forget that he had invited the violinist, and high enough to drown out the spinal-fluid-transubstantiating shittiness of the college bands, so that he was surprised when Eponine came over and grabbed his arm. “We’re up,” she said. She was so embarrassed about being nervous that she was compelled to give him the usual shit. “Can you even play?” 

“If I was dead, I could still play,” Grantaire said nonsensically. Though on the way up toward the stage he did duck into a corner and do a bump of coke to clear his head a little. 

In school, he had thought he was dying all the time. Sometimes it had kind of felt like he was dead. Going into the music was sometimes the only way to be alive, but it was also like not really being there the same way anymore. You put yourself into the great More, and it moved for you, beyond you. That was the contract. Immortality could be achieved, but not on your terms. 

Hard to say how it felt these days. For starters, he had since discovered a whole lot of way more fun ways to take a temporary sabbatical from his mind and body. Had he only ever done this to get high before he’d even known what getting high was? Probably not, because it was also about grief and missing something you’d never had and wanting to be somebody that you didn’t really know — but this was all way too heavy to be thinking about when your ability to stand up, let alone tune your instrument, rested on a precise calibration of uppers and downers which was rapidly unbalancing. Grantaire cursed Montparnasse’s impure coke for the nth time. He turned his tuning pedal off and feedback coursed through the guitar and then through all his blood, and he tapped his fist against the body of the instrument just above the strings to keep it humming, and looked up into the crowd. 

There wasn’t much light. The only light was the violinist. Otherwise the light, which came from the back of the room and from the hole in the roof, touched only him. He was standing in the front, wearing a fucking suit, looking like an extremely obvious secret agent, or a time traveler. Grantaire’s chest hurt, suddenly, and Alex Chilton’s voice wavered into the bombed-out wasteland of his brain, staticky, through a shortwave radio broadcast from fellow survivors of some apocalyptic Event: _I’m on the ledge, and blondie you’re the dredge…_

Behind him he heard Eponine count off. He jumped, and it caught him. Except he was always jumping, and it was always catching him. It was the only thing that could be reliably depended upon to catch him every time. He was like a hawk soaring, buffeted in the slipstream of noise. 

\--

Outside the stars were bright with cold and singing. Someone’s hand was on his shoulderblade, trying to hold his coat over him. This was challenging because he was talking quite a lot about the sound that the stars were making and gesturing energetically in their direction. 

“It’s your ears ringing,” said Eponine. “Mine are too. Why do you have to play so fucking loud?” 

She let go his coat to dig her cigarettes out of her jacket pocket, and it fell to the ground. He didn’t even feel cold until the third drag. It was snowing, just flurries, shocks of little light, and he felt them melt against his hot skin, like being touched with the point of a sewing needle. Then Eponine crouched and grabbed his coat and put it over him again. 

“You’ll never survive pneumonia,” she said, pulling the collar around his neck. Then she smiled, and he understood from this expression, which was somewhat less sardonic than the usual expression, that everything that had gone well, though it was kind of hard to believe that it had just happened. The person who normally lived inside him had climbed out through the sewer grate and walked away for a half hour or so. He was climbing back inside now — couldn’t stay away — but in these last moments, as the self edged its way back in amid all the decaying skeletons and bright pink insulation fluff and dry rot, he remembered other people who had lived inside him at other times coming back to him in the alley behind the school auditorium, or on the steps of the performance hall at Whitman; otherwise in the wet street behind the Fox, when he himself had played on the stage there, once upon a time… 

Then Marius joined them in the back alley, tailed by the college radio general manager, who shook everybody’s hands with effusive eye contact, and told them that the opening band she’d booked for a show her station was putting on with the University of Idaho in two weeks’ time had backed out, and had they ever heard of the Melvins? 

\--

The violinist was out front of the venue, leaning against his car. Grantaire wondered if it was really necessary that this felt every time like he was wearing a black hat in a scene from some cowboy western, watching the sheriff’s deputy cross out of the shadow of the overhanging facades and into the dusty sun…? 

“I love watching you play,” said the violinist. 

Grantaire sputtered. He kicked a stone into the rag of snow at the edge of the sidewalk. 

“Want to get in my car?” 

Grantaire did, shoving his guitar in the backseat on the way. The engine was on and it was warm. The violinist had scraped the ice off the windows in ragged white curls resting on the hood and the wipers. Beyond, the bare branches, reaching black, disfigured as a witch in the stiff breeze, and the sheer purple veracity of the strange sky. 

“You look different when you’re creating something,” the violinist said, shutting the drivers’ side door. 

“Oh my god,” said Grantaire. “I didn’t ask.” 

“Well, you do,” the violinist went on. 

Perhaps it should not have been so surprising that he was such a reckless driver. Grantaire reached for the handle above the passenger’s side window but it had been ripped off, so he braced himself drunkenly with an open hand against the dashboard. 

“We got asked to open for the Melvins,” Grantaire said. 

The violinist accelerated through a yellow light. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. 

“Imagine if somebody told you that you were going to be conducted by Pierre Boulez.” 

The violinist gave Grantaire a long illegible look. This might have been more welcome were he not driving about twenty miles above the speed limit, westward in the slow lane on the interstate. “I would tell them that this is obviously more your fantasy than mine, because I think Boulez is a pretentious bully.” 

“You know what I mean. What about fucking Leonard Bernstein.” 

“He’s dead.” 

The road was white with salt. The trees with snow. The violinist took the exit with such centrifugal force that Grantaire was flattened against the back of his seat like an astronaut after takeoff. 

“Who do you think was, like, the most influential conductor of all time?” 

“Nadia Boulanger,” said the violinist immediately. 

“Okay, imagine somebody told you that she was going to conduct you.” 

The violinist hesitated. At the stop sign at the bottom of the exit they waited while a logging truck passed slowly across the intersection. “She’s dead,” the violinist said finally. 

Grantaire put his forehead against the cold window to demonstrate that he had given up. 

The violinist lived on the far west side of the city by Highbridge Park. It wasn’t necessarily regarded as a good or bad neighborhood, because it wasn’t regarded as a neighborhood at all. None of the other houses had lights on, and there was a coyote in the street. 

Grantaire tripped over his own feet getting out of the violinist’s car. The coyote up the rise was watching him carefully, seeming to gauge his drunkenness with an appraising eye all too like the violinist’s, who came up from behind Grantaire presently, carrying his guitar. The coyote looked away from them toward the fingernail-sliver of the moon hanging low over the scraggly pines. “He’s always around here lately,” said the violinist. 

“Where are we,” said Grantaire. 

“I don’t think this neighborhood has a name or anything,” said the violinist. “It kind of feels not really colonized yet. But are you coming in?” 

There was something similar about the apartment itself, which was dark, even when the lights were on. The violinist had hung a framed poster reproduction of one of the really psychedelic Group of Seven mountain paintings above the drab couch in the living room, and there was a Rachmaninov record on the turntable with the needle lifted from the middle of the second side. A mug in the sink with a rime of coffee left inside blackening in a half-moon. It was warm and lonely. 

“You live like this,” Grantaire observed. 

The violinist ignored him. “Come on,” he said. 

There was another Group of Seven painting in the bedroom, hung up a little crookedly above the tiny twin bed in the corner. It had a kind of collapsing Norman Rockwell energy. “What’s this one,” Grantaire asked, struggling to take his shoes off. 

“It’s Marc-Aurèle Fortin,” said the violinist. Hearing him say French words was like being hit over the head with a brick made of sex. “It’s the Gaspésie.” 

“Is that where you’re from?” 

“No. We went in the summer sometimes.” 

The violinist sat on his bed. It seemed like much too small a space, metaphysically but also literally, for someone like the violinist to sleep. There was a wool blanket thrown haphazardly over it that looked like it had been knit by a bored old woman watching soap operas. From this vantage the violinist fixed Grantaire with a Medusafying gaze that stilled him even in the process of drunkenly standing on one socked foot to remove his left boot. He hardly even felt it when he eventually fell over, though the violinist startled and winced, and a book of sheet music fell off the dresser and onto the floor, casting yellowy papers over the yellowy carpet. 

“Sorry,” said Grantaire. 

“Come up here.” 

He did. He sat so that if he put his hand next to his thigh and the violinist put his hand next to his thigh, they still wouldn’t be touching, but only just. “You sleep in a twin bed,” he said. 

“I never have anybody else here.” 

“I don’t — I was just saying.” 

He looked up. The violinist must have been trying to turn him to stone for real. He felt tingly all over, like maybe it was starting. 

“You have incredible eyes,” said the violinist. “I can’t really think of anything more blue.” 

Grantaire’s face made some instinctive shape he knew was horrible. “God, are you fucking serious?” 

“I thought you might hate that,” said the violinist.

\--

Matters progressed. 

He had once been subject to a lecture from an art historian acquaintance on a bad acid trip in the basement stairwell of the freshman dorm at Whitman about the difference between _nude_ and _naked_. Evidently, there was one. Academia had sometimes seemed like a whole lot of obvious. 

It was metaphysically trying to feel like a work of art next to an actual work of art (the violinist) even as one had been posed like one of the Venuses by the horniest of the Italian masters. After all, xex was basically a lot of sucking desperation that might not necessarily be beautiful. 

He hadn’t jerked off in a twin bed since high school. The violinist leaned in above him like a medical resident blearily visible through failing anesthesia. “What do you think about when you do this by yourself?”

Grantaire looked up into the painting. Even in the printed reproduction the water looked like a plane of ripe gold. “You,” he said. “Mostly.” 

“Hmm,” said the violinist. “You could act like it.” 

Grantaire laughed, or at least he meant to, but it sounded like a sob, or something else, something hurt, something glad to be hurt. The violinist’s hand rested on his stomach below his belly button and he felt every muscle under his skin tighten still further protectively as though the violinist had touched him there with the point of a sword. Then the violinist’s hand went to Grantaire’s cheek and turned his face toward him. 

This was like looking into the fucking sun. The violinist’s thumb went over Grantaire’s lower lip and then touched inside it and Grantaire could literally not do this anymore. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to turn his head away again, straining his cheek against the violinist’s hand. 

“None of that,” said the violinist very gently. 

Grantaire opened his eyes. Couldn’t even say why he was doing anything at this point. The ceiling was blurry. The violinist’s face was clear. “Good boy,” said the violinist. 

“Jesus Christ,” said Grantaire, or that was what he tried to say; the end of it was garbled, because the violinist had put two fingers in his open mouth. 

He hated this; he was in humiliated ecstasy. It wasn’t enough; it was too much. He felt like ripping himself open; he felt like curling up like a pillbug into a little bun to protect the jelly inside. He felt in every way suspended more and more trepidatiously on the edge of a knife. The breathless suction _pop_ and the slippy connecting thread of his own saliva turning effervescently in the light when the violinist extracted his fingers from his mouth tightened the crank to its last conceivable turn. The violinist must somehow have known this. “Say my name,” he said. 

The sound of it was deep in Grantaire’s chest and it tore a piece off into his throat. Even like this he understood the name was the spell that would make the whole thing real. So somehow he said, “No.” 

The air went out of the vacuum and sucked them both into space. 

“Wait,” said the violinist, “what?” 

Too late. Total whiteout. 

\--

He woke up just before dawn on the violinist’s couch, still drunk. Gulped water straight out of the kitchen tap for a count of twenty and then left with his guitar and walked three miles home along the river in the shaky blueing darkness. 

\--

So this was happening. “I can’t believe it,” said Eponine, elbow-deep in the used country vinyl at the flea market on Sprague. 

“I can’t believe it either,” said Grantaire. He couldn’t afford to buy anything, but he was sitting on the floor holding a pink depression glass salt shaker up to the single beam of weak sunlight that would dare to reach inside this notorious deathtrap. Maybe it was the bootleg benzos from Montparnasse, but nothing could harsh this fucking mellow. “The Melvins!” 

He could hear her eye roll. He could feel it and sense it disturbing the dust. “I mean you and the violinist,” she said. 

“What about me and the violinist?” 

This time the eye roll was a literal noise from her throat. There was some disgust in there, and a little envy. “Don’t fuck with me, R!” she announced, crouching beside him to dig through a milk crate of cassette tapes. “Everybody and their mom saw you get in his car.” 

Held in the right light, the depression glass salt shaker kind of glowed. Grantaire’s mom had had a collection of little animals made out of this stuff, which she had kept on a shelf of delicate untouchables above the living room couch. “Am I supposed to feel chagrined?” he asked Eponine. 

“I don’t know.” She examined a John Prine tape, expertly cased the adjacent aisles, and tucked it in the pocket of her corduroy jumper. “How’s the sex?” 

“Weird.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean.” 

“I dunno. Did you hear the Galaxie 500 Peel Session where they did the Sex Pistols’ ‘Submission’?” 

Eponine’s face passed through a kind of flip book of comic-strip emotions. 

“I made a copy of the tape at Whitman if you want it,” Grantaire said. 

“I can’t stand Dean what’s-his-name’s voice.” 

“Hmm. Your loss.” 

Actually, he figured, maybe the better referent was “Touch Me I’m Sick" by Mudhoney, but Eponine would definitely know exactly what he meant if he evoked that song. 

“Grantaire,” said Eponine. She said his full name so irregularly that he almost dropped the salt shaker. He turned toward her, and she cased the aisles again, like she was about to shove another tape in her pocket, but instead she met his eyes. “I really don’t know,” she said. 

“Don’t know what?” 

“That this is a good idea.” 

Disarmed earnestness was such a rare expression on her face that he had to look away, and into the milk crate of tapes, where his gaze tripped over Hank Williams’ _I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry._

“Yeah,” he said, “I don’t think so either.” 

\--

At home he put the Hank Williams tape on, having pocketed it, and smoked a joint lying on the bed, staring out the window. The crying slide guitar tone was really so beautiful and maybe something he ought to think about writing some songs with, somehow, though it was almost unbearably nostalgic, not even for anything in particular but just generally, which was perhaps what made it so unbearable. Having had a not great childhood and spending much of one’s time doing lots of drugs (related?) made it really easy to avoid the Blitzkrieging effects of nostalgia most of the time. It was the rare work of art that could have one feeling nostalgic for something that had never existed. Of course, the loneliness of that situation perhaps befit the song at issue. 

Hank Williams, who had died at age twenty-nine in the backseat of a car being driven by a hired college student between performances in Knoxville and Canton, Ohio, of a heart attack, apparently, brought on by a deadly combination of alcohol, the sedative chloral hydrate, and morphine, ought to have known something about the unique and indelible torment of loneliness, self-imposed or otherwise, Grantaire figured, hovering the ember on the end of the joint over his bare knee, feeling the sharp searing heat, relenting at the exact last, putting it out on his belt buckle. 

\--

The violinist was at the diner. To date, as far as Grantaire knew, he had not dared to venture so far north of the river. The sight of him was so shocking that Grantaire froze halfway through the door, but his arrival had already rung the hanging bells, and the violinist had already looked up from the local paper and the half-done crossword and his mug of black coffee. 

The waitress waved from behind the counter and gestured that he should sit at the bar. God help him he almost did. Maybe this was growth or something. He went over and slid into the vinyl booth across from the violinist, who was tucking the paper into his instrument case. 

“You left this time,” the violinist noted. 

“So we’re even.” 

“Are we?” 

The waitress came over with another mug and coffee. “I’d’ve made you breakfast,” said the violinist when she left.

“Really?” 

“I have this cool old mandolin,” said the violinist. “I thought you might want to play it.” 

“What! Where — what?” 

“It’s under my bed.” 

Grantaire put his head in his hands on the table. 

“In a case!” 

“How many instruments do you even play?” 

“I don’t know, a handful of the bowed ones. I can’t play the mandolin. Someone gave it to me. It’s probably disastrously out of tune.” 

The waitress came back and Grantaire ordered what he always did: toast and bacon and two fried eggs. The violinist ordered the fancy Eggs Benedict. The waitress refreshed their coffees and then she went away again. 

“I’ll come over and play it,” Grantaire said. “You can fiddle and we can do some bluegrass tunes.” 

“Oh, god.” 

“What else are you supposed to do with a mandolin?” The violinist’s brow flinched. Evidently he had not considered this before. “I think I could play some Ry Cooder songs,” Grantaire told him. 

“Who?” 

“Like the _Paris, Texas_ soundtrack.” 

“What?” 

Grantaire leaned back in the booth, picking the skin around his thumbnail, genuinely flabbergasted. “Don’t goad me,” he said. 

“I’m legitimately asking you legitimate questions and maybe you should reflect not the fact that your surrounding yourself with other people whose taste is exactly the same as yours means that you register dissonance as conflict — ” 

“Dissonance! I thought you hated dissonance!” 

The violinist’s face pinched. “There was no cinema in my hometown and I wasn’t allowed to listen to music with words until I went to college.” 

“And then you surrounded yourself with people whose taste was exactly the same as yours…” 

The violinist crossed his arms across his chest and further steeled his steely gaze. “I refuse to let it be insurmountable.” 

\--

Outside the sky was clear and it was bitingly cold. It was the time of winter where the sun seemed to start going down about as soon as it came up. To wit, it was just after noon, but the light was going drab gold against the old brick and the rags of gray snow. The violinist put the point of his sharp nose into the collar of his wool coat. His leather gloves were very well-made but wearing through at the pads of the index finger and thumb, and before Grantaire could think about them very hard he said, “What do you think we’re doing?” 

“Walking,” said the violinist muffledly. 

“Oh my god, come on.” 

The violinist cut him a savage look sideways. “Is it okay?” 

“I don’t know. Is it?” 

“Maybe if you told me what you wanted from me,” said the violinist, “I could give it to you.” 

Leave the gloves on, Grantaire thought. Put me over your lap. Put _Led Zeppelin IV_ on the stereo. Tell me something I already know: tell me something I’ll believe. 

“Yeah,” said Grantaire, “and vice versa. Maybe if _you_ told _me…_ ” 

They were waiting for the light at the corner of Monroe and Maxwell by the music store where Grantaire’s mother had bought him his first guitar not long after his father died. The violinist considered. “Touché,” he said at last. 

\--

“I really think people your age just don’t understand beauty,” said the violinist. 

Sometimes it was trying to figure out what to be outraged about first in something the violinist said. “We’re the same age,” Grantaire reminded him. 

“You know what I mean.”

“Actually, I really don’t!”

They had an uncanny knack for making any space into a sort of metaphysical boxing ring. In this case, sitting cross legged on Grantaire’s bed, because the seat had fallen through the good chair and the hardwoods were muddy and cold so there was nowhere else. Between them Grantaire had set an ashtray which was already overflowing. The violinist had accepted a single puff from a joint, despite its extreme quality, having not been purchased from Montparnasse or any other unsavory dealer in Spokane County, in fact having been purchased from the person who had grown it in a greenhouse at the south end of Lake Pend Oreille, in celebration of having booked the show with the Melvins. The violinist had barely inhaled but appeared to have been hit pretty hard judging by the hilarious two minute coughing fit and resulting expostulation of an even more ridiculous bent than usual. 

“Maybe I mean Americans of your age,” said the violinist contemplatively. 

“Our age,” Grantaire corrected. “Plus the States and Canada have the most similar cultures of any two countries in the world.” 

“Quebec doesn’t count.”

“You keep telling yourself that. You’re one of us.” 

“The point is that it literally hurts me,” said the violinist. “The… like, the terrible abrasion.”

“Fuck off. Mr. Perfect Pitch over here.”

“I don’t have perfect pitch,” said the violinist. “It hurts. You could make beautiful music.” 

The violinist made no secret of the fact that he thought Grantaire was an incorrigible squanderer of his god-given talents, maybe in the vein of Syd Barrett or Nick Drake or Berry Oakley, except that it was not clear that the violinist knew who those guys were. In private he tended to play this like he was mourning Schubert’s early death at 31 before he had finished Piano Sonata in C Major. In public his take was more mocking, in the vein of how all the rest of their friends tended to relate to the fact that Grantaire had more than once in high school appeared as a junior conductor leading the symphony at the Fox, which was easier to deal with. 

“I do make beautiful music,” Grantaire said, to spite the violinist, though he meant it. 

“Oh my god,” said the violinist. “You’re insane.” 

The trick was to make everything a contest. “Maybe I have a more liberal definition of beauty than you.” 

“Tell me something you think is beautiful,” said the violinist. 

Grantaire bit his tongue on the first thing to come to mind, and went with the second. “Blind Willie Johnson, Dark Was the Night. Oh, and Kanga Roo by Big Star.” 

The violinist blinked like a fish, washing the translucent lashes over big stoned eyes. “Is that a band?” 

“Oh my god. You literally have no fucking leg to stand on.” 

“I’ve never even heard of either of those things!” 

“Then how you can you look me in the face and tell me I don’t understand beauty! You willfully shut yourself off from this stuff because you think it’s not pure enough.” 

“So do you,” said the violinist, cocking the victorious eyebrow. 

Grantaire gawped like a fish for a few precious, priceless seconds in which the violinist’s wry victory grin expanded by wobbly millimeters. 

God damn it! 

He stewed. The violinist got up, stumbling endearingly on the uneven floorboards, and went to the crate of tapes and records by the bookshelf. Beyond him in the window the dusk was moving from the east and the light across the trees and lawns and rooftops was a vivid mourning kind of gold, catching the snow in stretching blue shadows. Cutting the silence of the Edward Hopper tableau, the violinist found Grantaire’s cassette of Big Star’s _Third_ and put it in the player with the wrong side up so that it started going on “Stroke it Noel.” _Child will you come on down…_

“This is your song,” said Grantaire before he could think better of it. He was immediately embarrassed and lay back on the bed with his head over the edge and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

“Why is it my song?” 

The bed moved when the violinist sat on it. 

“Listen to it, for god’s sake.” 

The violinist did. Then he said, “You’re just saying that because there’s a violin.” 

Grantaire looked across his upside-down room. The light under the door, the light on the floor, the dust under the fridge. How was it possible for one person to be so obtuse? The violinist had insisted on taking his shoes off and there was a hole in the heel of his navy blue socks. He was sitting beside Grantaire with his feet on the floor and his hands folded neatly into his lap as though he were in church, just listening. His brow seemed to tighten on occasion as though he were absorbing dozens of tiny blows. “You really don’t have to think about it that hard,” Grantaire told him. “It’s just D7 over F#.” 

“That chord?” 

“Yeah — ” Grantaire waited until it sounded again — “that one.” 

When it was over the violinist got up and rewound the tape and started it from the beginning of the song. “Ha,” said Grantaire.

“What?” 

“You like it!” 

The violinist came around the bed and stood so that the linty knees of his wool pants were about even with Grantaire’s sight line. Then he crouched, and his knees cracked, so that they were looking at each other with misoriented faces, and on the stereo Chilton was going, _do you wanna dance…_

\--

On Saturday, Grantaire went to the Fox ten minutes before the matinee started to see if there were any tickets left. There was just one, in the far left balcony, and he paid six dollars for it, which was everything in his wallet, including some dimes and nickels. Inside it was cold and smelled like old paper. He wanted a coffee but had no money left, and anyway after he waited in line for a few minutes to pee the bell started ringing in the lobby signaling everybody to take their seats. His was tucked in a corner behind a post next to a very old woman. “Hi,” he said, struggling out of his coat and scarf.

She looked him up and down. “What are you doing here?” 

He knew, from an earlier reluctant glance in the bathroom mirror, that he looked hungover and particularly grungy, though he had buttoned and tucked in his black flannel shirt and tried to do something socially acceptable to his hair. “I’m here to hear the music,” he told the old lady. 

“This is a classical performance.” 

“Well, you know, Cage is a little avant garde, isn’t he?” 

The lady grimaced and turned away. Grantaire sat and fished the program out from under his seat. The lights dimmed, drawing the shadows sharp, and on the stage the velvet curtain drew apart, and the sound stretched, reaching bright gold, to fill the room.

\---

\--

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [stroke it noel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrXM7fKKlR0) by big star
> 
> and my message to all of you -- [thank you friends](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC0Wa3P_dO0) by big star

**Author's Note:**

> as you can probably tell from reading whatever this is, i've never read this book nor seen any of the adaptations! i just read a lot of fanfiction while extremely depressed and it seared itself into my brain for all eternity. i also know nothing about music theory. i'm claiming artistic license, and the fact that i wrote most of this while extremely jet lagged, but please let me know if anything is grievously wrong. 
> 
> [the wilfred owen poem](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_Saw_His_Round_Mouth%27s_Crimson) that R remembers
> 
> my favorite recording of [schoenberg's "transfigured night"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-pVz2LTakM)


End file.
